BuzzFeed Is About To Get A Lot Bigger

BuzzFeed, the publisher you either love or hate (or possibly some strange mixture of the two) announced a major expansion plan, propelled by a fresh injection of cash in the form of a $50 million series E round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

The publisher says its editorial team will grow and become three separate divisions: BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed Buzz, and BuzzFeed Life, to expand its offerings, and make the differences between three types of content clearer. This way, presumably, things like "pizza hacks" can be separated from actual important news.

The News division will include "everything from breaking news to a foreign desk, whose team of staff correspondents aronud the world will double." The Life team includes "service journalism," and will triple in size. It will focus on helping people "live their lives around DIY, Food and Style." It will also launch a test kitchen and foo dlab in Manhattan, where it will create more original content.

The Buzz team will presumably continue to crank out the type of content the site is mostly known for.

They're also expanding their video division, which is to become BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which it says will focus on all moving images, "From a GIF to feature film and everything in between."

I can only imagine what kinds of feature films we'll be seeing from BuzzFeed.

Founder and CEO Peretti, “Over the last decade, traditional media has been upended by technology, a disruption of the print, video, news, entertainment and advertising industries that is now accelerating at lightning speed. We created BuzzFeed because people still want to be informed, entertained, and inspired but the way they consume media has dramatically shifted. Today we think the time is perfect to grow our company, build our brand and greatly increase the content we are producing so we can be the number one digital media brand. The investment from Andreessen Horowitz will allow us to double down on our company’s mission by creating a new organization and expand rapidly in all areas."

Executive Chairman Kenneth Lerer added, “The future of content companies is crystal clear: mobile, video, social and tech. Expanding BuzzFeed’s business across each of these areas is the key to the future. With distribution fully built out, content is the future and this expansion will allow us to create more and more content across the social web."